The Crazy Stuff We Do: Baby Chicks, Week 1

Pin It

If you are considering getting a few chickens as bitty chicks, you should be warned.

First, close your eyes and picture Ned Stark, leaning on Ice and overlooking Winterfell's fields. It doesn't matter if you have never read or watched Game of Thrones. You know the exact image. 

Brace yourself. Crazy is coming. 

Maybe some people approach this more methodically and in a circle-of-life way or buy one hundred chickens at once, so maybe you won't have this experience. But if you are like me, with a small home, a small coop, a big desire to have some fresh, healthy eggs, and ZERO idea as to what you are really doing, then brace yourself.

Here is a bunch of crazy stuff you should anticipate in the first week with bitty chicks. 

1) They will be cuter and fluffier and louder than you imagined. 

It will take minutes to name them.

2) Your Google-Fu will reach an expert level. Pro tip: Be sure to type "baby chicks" or "baby chickens" because straight up "chicks" likely won't get you the answers you are looking for. 

3) Something will happen and you'll find yourself trying to explain that you were using a heater on a chicken because of pasty butt and the color red and vents. 

Heating up Dinner.
She made a full recovery.

4) Your coop will be too small. Instantly. Whether the company shipped you extra chicks (surprise!) or you realized they are more addictive than potato chips, you will need a bigger coop. Prepare to sacrifice an afternoon to coop design and middle-school math. You will turn into MacGyver. But your chicks will be so happy. 

Chickie Corral

5) You will take crazy pictures.

6) You will start to tell people about your chick's personalities after a day or two with them, and marvel at how different each one becomes. That is what we, your chicken people, are here for. Don't tell your chickenless neighbor or the barista trying to make you delicious coffee at a red-doored box store of your frequenting. They won't embrace your crazy quite like another chicken person.

Warning!

Pin It

Whatever masterminds came together to put dog food into pouches (why?!!?) and then put them in the second shelf from the ground on an end cap... These people have never spent more than 2 minutes with a toddler. 

Crazy Stuff We Do: How to find your people

Pin It We all want to find our "people." I'm not talking about your Ride or Die friend you met in grade school and will love always and forever, because that people is always your people, regardless of what kind of crazy you concoct.

I'm talking about when you leave home and have a profession and a passion and need to find a group of people that respect and understand both. It isn't easy. I used to think that it took me a while to find my Village, but I now realize that I came about it much faster than most.

How do you find those people?

You sniff them out by identifying your crazy in them. I'm dead serious.

I do a lot of things every single day that make me pause and think this is really insane. Just as fast, I know who to turn to for reassurance (because they do the same crazy thing) or someone who will get a good-natured laugh out of it (because they would never do that and love you anyway).

My friends are a phone call or text message or coffee date away. Maybe you don't have that. (I really hope you do, though.) So I'm going to start writing about the crazy things I do with its own little section. Maybe you'll understand and commiserate a bit. Maybe you'll shake your head and swear off that bit of crazy in your own world. Just don't get all Sancti on my blog. This is just for fun. Unless I'm doing something truly harmful, like feeding my husband Lily of the Valley accidentally.

I bring you, Crazy Stuff We Do.

Bubbles!!!

Pin It Raptor turned two last month!

I'm a January baby. V. is also a January baby. I have waited a long time to plan a summer birthday party.

We have a pool and a grill and a swing set. What else do you need?

Answer: cake and a bouncy house.

As awesome as the bouncy house was, we need to talk about the bubble table.

I'm sure this isn't an original idea. But it works.

When Miss V was a baby, we asked for a raised sand table as an amazing sensory bin. Her Papa and Nana sent one to her, and the fun commenced. We used it for water beads, for chopstick practice, and for a dinosaur habitat. This summer, I don't think anything but bubbles will go into it. It was that popular. 

First, we went to the Dollar Tree and I let Miss V pick out whatever we thought would make good bubbles. She came up with all this:

Paper plate holders, a pool noodle we cut up. mega horns, bins, and fly swatters. 

We fill the table with a few big containers of bubbles and go to town. Everyone ends up soaked in bubbles (fair warning given) and everyone plays until the bubbles are gone. 

So this summer, fill your sensory bins or kiddie pools or tupperware with bubbles and go nuts. 

FYI: The fly swatters are fantastic. Wave them in the air or hold them in front of a fan for a million bubbles. 

Chickens: The first 48 Hours

Pin It It took 48 hours to turn me into a Crazy Chicken Lady. No, it took 30 seconds to turn me, and another 47 hours, 59 minutes and 30 seconds for me to come to terms with that.

It took her seconds to accept her obsession.

In my late night binge reading about all things chicken (because when else am I supposed to read?! 2am is awesome.) I found Kathy, the Chicken Chick. Not only does she know everything about chickens, but she seems to be really good at keeping them alive and happy.

SPOILER ALERT: Researching keeping chickens is like researching how to raise children. Just try looking up chickens and garlic. Some people think any garlic outright kills chickens. Some tell you it will make eggs taste funky. Some tell you it is an amazing and you should feed them garlic every moment of every day, forever. Sanctichickemommies in full force, people. I gave them garlic. Let the hate mail commence.

So I found Kathy as a pretty solid resource and person aligning with my lifestyle (she grows a ton of herbs. I never thought I'd find someone who loves lavender as much as I do.), and decided to read as much as her blog pertaining to the one and under crowd as I could. We bought a plastic tub and the girls helped me set it up in preparation for our chicks, of which we thought we'd have three.

The post office, which I called with the regularity of calling my doctor the day before my induction with Raptor (baby 2), said the truck comes in at 6am, and I should expect a call shortly thereafter. I was up earlier than my children. At 11:30am, when they called, I chased my girls into the car and we claimed our (five) chicks.

Chickens were supposed to be part of our living garden. We take care of them, they take care of us, they turn to The Most Amazing matzoh ball broth ever after their laying days are done. I thought Kathy was a bit crazy when she said chickens were like Pringles, and how she features each of her 398472 chickens on her site, each with a catchy name and individuality. I opened that box and out popped six chicks. One jumped right up on me and into my V-neck. (Beware. Your boobs are warm and chicks dig that.) A few minutes later, I had managed to save one chick for my husband to name, and was googling how to expand coops. Kathy knows her stuff.

Guess which one my husband named.

I have done some crazy things in that time (post to come) all in the name of chickens.

 Here's what I have learned:

1) If you get less than a farm of chickens (and maybe even then) then maybe you won't instantly name and love them all. If this were some post apocalyptic dystopian teen novel I'd be able to not anthropomorphize my chickens as soon as I see their little chicky fluff and be able to eat them. But we live in New England, where people in suburban settings keep livestock as pets and see how smart animals really are, and then can't imagine eating them. But we will eat other people's responsibly farmed livestock and make amazing bone broth because TRADITION!

2) You will read all the blogs. I often wonder if the internet is a good idea. What would we do if we couldn't Google something and have a million opinions on the matter? Well, maybe I wouldn't have flown down the stairs after waking up the first night after the chicks came. How many blogs did I read where one just DIES? They sent a spare, just incase! My kids named them. Miss V told Husband that she was making a new country - New America - where she would take the chickens when they are grown to hide from him, just because he mentioned what some people do with chickens when they stop laying. (He also named his chicken Dinner, so...) But then maybe the one chick (Dinner) with pasty butt would have died by now. Regardless, here we are, people who don't sleep and Google all things. You will read all the blogs.

3) You will do crazy things. If you respect life and accept that you now are in charge of making these tiny things survive an existence much better than Purdue, you will start to do The Crazy Things. I've already promised to tell you my crazy things later (and it is hereditary, apparently) but just know that the sooner you accept you've become a crazy chicken person, you will find your chicken people and a community that embraces that insanity. And your normal village will love you for your uniqueness, because how else are they going to get fresh eggs?

4) They grow fast. You have kids and hashtag everything "The years are short." Then you get a puppy and ponder how quickly they change compared to your kids (which makes you feel a little better about how fast your kids do/don't grow). Then you get chicks and realize that 48 hours later they look like a different bird. And you CARE about that. (Embrace the crazy, K.)

They are really freakin' cute. 

Chickenmania, the prequil.

Pin It We got chickens.

This has been years in the making. Like most couples I've talked to on the chicken fence, one person really wants chickens, one really does not. With the addition of children, my husband was officially outnumbered. Three out of Four family members voted YES on the Chicken Proposition.

I did what any educated, modern person wandering into unknown territory would do: I went to Pinterest and started clicking links like it was my job. I read everything there was to read. Blogs, comment boards, infographics, opinionated articles, actual paper books like back in the day. If it was about chicks and out there, I read it.

Then I panicked and realized that we already missed the ideal spring window, and if we wanted our chickens out of our garage before our summer vacation and to lay eggs this year, we needed chicks within a few weeks.

I ordered chicks. In all my reading and researching, I didn't realize there were chicks widely available at feed stores, but there are. If you want to pay a bit less and aren't particular, go this route. But I also wanted one of two breeds, and ultimately chose Easter Eggers. They are "prolific" egg producers, they aren't gigantic, and they are said to be extremely friendly which is great if you know your kids are going to be all up in the hen house from the second they arrive. We also ordered a coop. Our coop holds three to four big chickens. I ordered five, figuring we'd either give two away or have some just incase. Because, life.

In the ordering clause it stated that it could be weeks depending on what hatches when. I ordered the chicks Sunday night at 8pm. A woman called me to tell me she was shipping them on Monday at 10am.

We ordered our chicks from Cackle Hatchery. Not only were they speedy and cost-effective, considering we ordered such a small number of chicks, but they sent a spare. We opened the box and - surprise! - there were six! (Really, if you are ordering chicks, look into them. They are wonderful.)

Mommas, do not make this mistake. I thought we would give two away. I thought we were doing some life exercise on understanding where food comes from and the circle of life and all this other stuff that I had all figured out in my head. Chickens are not pets, right? They lay eggs for a few years, you can send them off to a butcher after they don't lay, and you have the most wonderful base for your matzoh ball soup broth. WRONG. Every chick looks different. And within five minutes, five had names. My gracious children left one for my husband to name. And they all have different personalities. Maybe if we had ordered 50 chicks, that wouldn't have been a problem, but what is done is done. (My town also prohibits the amount of chickens you can keep. I'm pretty sure 50 is not acceptable unless you have a farm.)

Apparently I'm not the only person with this problem. Google how to expand a coop and you will come up with many ideas. So as soon as our coop arrives, expect to see how I turned the standard four-bird coop into the Lexus of bird homes for my flock of six.

Life Happened

Pin It I used to keep blogs like people collect stamps or hoard old emails. I was one of those serial bloggers. Naturally I started a SAHM blog when I stopped working after my first daughter was born. We bought a house, we adopted a dog, we traveled to France and made another baby. That was three years ago. Our youngest just turned two. Our garden is mostly under control, our puppy is mostly trained, our days are mostly routine. Miss V has a year of preschool under her belt.

I'm not a gifted writer. I don't have much focus and I don't have a particular genre that suits me. (Is "Mom" a genre? It should be.) I'm going to attempt resurrection of this blog in an effort to both keep me sane and document what it is that has me running around all the time. Maybe some day my kids will look at it and understand my coffee habit better.

So here we go again!